11 April 2014 10:28 AM

Why Ideas Matter

This posting is aimed at showing how wild, fringe ideas, which hardly anyone notices at the time they are first set out, turn into British government policy. I must express my gratitude to the estimable and courageous Erin Pizzey, for kindly lending me her copy of ‘The Family Way’, a pamphlet written by that Terrifying Trinity of Harriet Harman, Anna Coote and Patricia Hewitt, and published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), at the end of September 1990. The excellent People’s History Museum in Manchester (famous for its prize exhibit, Michael Foot’s alleged donkey jacket) were, unusually, unable to find it in their archives).

I was in Moscow at the time it came out, barely aware of the tunnelling and burrowing which the radical left were already doing beneath the apparently solid structure of British family life. I also had no idea that the reliably conservative newspaper for which I then worked would, within a few years, come into the ownership of a company whose chief was a keen supporter of the IPPR, and would support New Labour at the 1997 election. Thus is the astonishing future hidden from us in a fog of unknowing. All one can learn from this is that there are some surprises coming, and that normality is an illusion.

Even so, some changes can be observed as they gestate and form. I think the state’s increasingly keen support for the unmarried family is such a change.

In fact, before I spent my two and a bit years in Moscow, I was pitifully unaware of the nature, power, extent and speed of social, cultural and political change which was already changing this country. Although I was myself an ex-Marxist, I did not properly understand the extent and nature of my own abandoned beliefs, though by then I almost instinctively knew them to be dangerous and bad. I still by and large accepted the clichés in thought which most people accepted, bowed to conventional wisdom on most matters, regarded the ‘West’ as a solid bloc of virtue and believed that the Conservative Party was still a reliable defender of institutions, morals and traditions. I thought that the defining issues between left and right were ownership of the means of production, trade union power and which side you took in the Cold War.

My education had been wholly inadequate until I went, as it were, out into the cold and dark and saw the bones and guts of the wounded world, exposed as they then were in that history-haunted, semi-devastated landscape.

So if I had seen ‘The Family Way – a new approach to policy-making’, in its dull pink-and white cover on the day it was published (a day when I was in fact moving into my sinister, magnificent Moscow flat overlooking the river) , I would probably have dismissed it as just another display of utopian fantasy by a discredited and marginalised left.

I can find almost no reference to it in the newspaper files of the time. Robin Oakley, then political editor of the Daily Mail, was among the few who noticed it.

He wrote on 27th September 1990, under the headline ‘Parties urged to abandon “cosy family”’

‘A LEFT-of-centre think-tank urged yesterday that parties should abandon the Victorian concept of the family as a private self-contained unit with a breadwinning father married to a non-employed caring mother. Politicians should accept instead that fewer people will marry and a greater proportion will divorce. Policies were needed to improve the working prospects of women and to encourage men to be more active parents. The Institute for Public Policy Research paper, The Family Way, by Anna Coote, Patricia Hewitt, Neil Kinnock's former policy co-ordinator, and Harriet Harman, Labour's health spokesman, called for men and women to be free to combine parenthood and paid work on an equal footing. More child-care facilities should be provided to help women to work and become financially independent. Paternity leave and other measures were demanded to encourage fathers not to be ``the Sunday male'', insulated from their children by working life. The report said that in families in which fathers had played an active role with the children, there were better prospects of a child maintaining a good relationship with both parents after a divorce.

At the Westminster launch of the document, Ms Harman accused the government of stigmatising 2.4 million children who did not live in traditional families with two married parents. ``The government is badly wrong on the family. Instead of a sensible public policy, it is whipping up public anxiety about the changes in family life. It is standing on the sidelines wringing its hands and saying `We wish these changes were not happening','' she said.

The document suggested that family structures were reacting to the shift to a service economy, the new phase of information technology, the declining birthrate, the expansion of higher education and the modern expectations of women. With marriage changing ``from social institution to private relationship'', couples placed more emphasis on the personal qualities of their partners, seeking companionship, communication and sexual compatibility. Women's lives were altering but there were few signs of men's lives undergoing compatible changes.

There was little evidence to support the idea that lone parenthood was a direct cause of children's under-achievement, or of juvenile delinquency. There was, however, ample evidence that lone parenthood was associated with poverty which hindered children's development emotionally and educationally. Public policy should encourage rather than coerce. The report put the emphasis on making men more responsible, changing their role in the household, encouraging women to work and forming strong bonds with their children.

Among measures suggested were tax relief or credits on child-care expenses, a local tax on businesses for councils to spend on child care, making planning approval conditional on the provision of nurseries, and creating consortia of businesses, local authorities and child-care companies to run nurseries.

On health, the report urged a choice of contraceptive services with a special focus on teenagers. Employed women should have the right to six weeks' paid maternity leave and men to ten days' paternity leave. Parental leave of a minimum three months was demanded, with an allowance paid out of public funds, possibly financed by contributions from employers. Workers should be allowed to return to work part-time for up to five years after parental leave.

The report urged quicker ``fault-free'' divorces without partners having to attribute blame for the breakdown. It also supported a comprehensive non-adversarial family court system.

Calls were rejected for the replacement of child benefit with tax allowances. Those would go in most cases to fathers who would not necessarily spend them on the children, the report said. Income tax should be increased to pay for much higher child benefit.’

This is , typically of Robin, a good, clear, concise account. But that is the limitation of news. What Erin Pizzey spotted, and has since drawn to our attention, is that the document was not just a series of policy suggestions made by marginal members of a beaten and powerless party. It contained a strong ideological current, to which we should have paid far more attention.

The paragraph to which Erin Pizzey draws attention is on page 26 . It comes after a lengthy passage on how men are pretty dreadful. E.g.: ‘most domestic violence and child sexual abuse is perpetrated by married men against their own wives and children’. Can this still be true? The assertion is based on a study made between 1977 and 1982 by ‘Cleveland Refuge and Aid for Women and Children’ , studying 393 women who sought refuge to escape domestic violence, plus some ‘unpublished figures’ supplied to London Women’s Aid by the Metropolitan Police, plus a 1984 Journal study on the prevalence of abuse by stepfathers as opposed to natural fathers. My guess is that in the pre-1985 period most women with children were still married as a matter of course. What would be more interesting, now that cohabitation and non-marriage have become much more common, would be to survey this problem in comparable households among the married and the unmarried.

Then there’s ‘the great majority (84 per cent) of adults convicted of criminal offences are male, and men account for an even higher proportion(91 per cent) of those convicted of violent crimes. Many of these male convicted criminals are married men and it is undoubtedly the case that many boys learn to be violent and/or criminal by following the example of their own fathers’ etc etc etc.

‘Moreover, as we have noted, women do almost all the work involved in bringing up their children, whether or not they are living with the children’s father; this has remained unchanged for generations.’

In short, men are a thoroughly bad lot. And so we come to the key sentence:

‘It cannot therefore be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony or cohesion’.

This last bit is not just a description of existing circumstances. It is an actual battle-cry for the positive virtues of the fatherless family, though I doubt whether Ms Harman (married to a trades union official) or Ms Hewitt (married to a left-wing judge) would have said it as clearly and openly as they approached Cabinet office seven years later.

The figures in the report, written in the deepening twilight of the dying Thatcher period, are startling.

‘Between 1971 and 1987, lone parents as a proportion of all families with dependent children , rose from 8% to 14%’ though the figures were far higher for central London (26.6%) and other major cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Birmingham ( roughly 20% in each).

They had no idea how lucky they were. The *national* average of such families is now about to reach 24%, and they are almost universal in some of the harsher areas of our big cities, while cohabiting households (affecting one adult in six) have doubled in number since 1996 and are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the UK.

What’s also clear from the report is that much of this social change has been driven by the needs of business, which in the early 1990s began actively to want married women to go out to work (the authors correctly note this is a dilemma for Conservatives who seek to be pro-family and pro-business at the same time).

They note that, under external pressures ‘the traditional, Victorian model of family life is becoming a minority pursuit’.

How many of these pressures might have been avoided or mitigated by genuinely conservative social policies is hard to say. Clearly these three authors are not social conservatives, and are far from dismayed by the developments they report. But the package outlined in Robin Oakley’s report is surely aimed at making it easier for the world to rub along *without* the Victorian model. And so it has.

Was this inevitable? Or was it just possible, and encouraged? Could we in fact have chosen another direction, had conservative thinkers been alert to the danger? I suspect so (Germany, for instance, has taken a very different path, as has Japan).

In any case, it is a warning to us all, to take seriously those tiny, diligent pressure groups and think tanks, and their worthy pamphlets.

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Dear Peter Hitchens,

Thanks for the interesting article. I recently read a book by Erin Pizzey 'This Way to The Revolution - a Memoir' in which she discusses the opening of the first women's refuge. It is a very enlightening book and challenges many of the radical feminist dogma of today which points to all men being the monster and women being the passive victim.

It is interesting that through her own experiences with communism in her own life she recognised the women's movement to be another 'wing' of communism - especially rad-feminism. Basically we today in Britain are all labouring under the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto and it appears to be supported by all the major political parties as well as the feminist agenda that is being foisted upon all and sundry whether they like it or not.

Besides, women's rights movement, as Erin Pizzey points out, is now BIG Business and the refuges all around the world get millions in government subsidies etc., benefits that many will fight tooth and nail to keep!

It is amazing that the UK Government has pushed through legislation to legalise and promote same-sex marriage and yet at the same time to undermine and destroy the traditional marriage union. Compare the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto to todays society and see if you agree that we are labouring under it:

1.Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2.A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3.Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4.Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5.Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6.Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7.Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8.Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9.Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.

10.Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form and combination of education with industrial production. (Taken from Wikipedia)
---
In forcing women and men to work it seems to me that the 'industrial armies' of which once were primarily men now include women while the kids are provided a 'free education', state propaganda, in public schools.

I thank Brian Meredith and Robert for their replies, but I hope they will forgive me if I remain sceptical.
I can't accept, without laughing, that any politician has genuine beliefs or principles."Socialism in Perpetuity"? Why ever would they want that? To "safeguard their positions"? Are they not safe enough already?
No, the only motivation these people possess, the only principle they have, the only thing they "believe" in, is their own prospects, immediate and long term, for self-advancement.
Has the expenses scandal and the situation of A. Blair, for example, taught us nothing?

Christopher Charles;"Is this really what PH wants to return to"?
I don't recall PH saying he wished to return to anything at all.Having lived through
ww2 I recall some people doing well out of it but it doesn't make war good for the majority and If you don't believe there is a war on men in the western world you must be living elsewhere.
Erin is one of the leaders in AVFM now but,if you want to learn about the argument you could do worse than to start with Karen Straughan,a girl writes what,in her
showdown with Naomi Wolf.Feminism is the most pernicious group that you
will ever encounter and ,it is winning,no doubt about that.Most people will say good luck to them but if you are raising a boy and pay close attention you will see for yourselves the damage it is doing.

It is also my opinion, formed over several years now. Thinking of the society my grandchildren live in, so very different to the 60's and my teenage years and seeing what was happening in my children's years, that when you talk about undermining the family, it includes the values that families pass on. That they have also been undermined by the drugs culture and the binge drinking culture and the celebrity and (advertising materialistic culture, along with the other destabilising things you mention..
Along with the creep of getting children into state education and nursery care from very young. Keeping schools open until late. Just how much influence will a family have in future?
Where once young children who did not have the best start in life had a good society around them. now those, especially in dysfunctional family units, (and it's bad enough to watch these messages being sent out if you are a strong family) have double the problems to contend with.

Alright, I've not actually been a 1950s housewife (being male and 63), but producing and keeping a nice home would (in my view) be a LOT more satisfying than the meaningless, boring wageslavery that most women, and men, have to endure (and then go home and rush through the hoovering, dusting, etc., and then collapse too exhausted to do anything else until it's time to go back to the office.) Work ("careers") being satisfying, creative, meaningful etc., might be true for a few top people (men and women), but it's certainly not the case for the vast majority. Christopher Charles's mother might have THOUGHT it would be better going out to work - but would it really have turned out that way? The other man's grass-syndrome again?

On domestic violence. I had an interesting chat awhile back with a long retired policeman and he told me rightly or wrongly, many years ago the thought was if the man was removed from the household as the breadwinner that the family would then suffer with no money coming in.
Yet today with housing and benefit and social help there are many women who do continue to stay, for other reasons.
I have read a comment sent in to the NARPO, (for retired officers), magazine and also heard a story relating to many many years ago where on a call to domestic violence, the lady of the house was asked to put the kettle on, while the officer had a word with husband in another room. Leaving with the words," I don't think he will be troubling you again ma'am".
Whereas today there is court involvement, often retraction of statements, the violence continues. Or it goes to court and maybe a letter is produced from abused partner. A non custodial sentence, community order, fine and probationary period and then the male still is taken back, in some cases.

Then there are the new family units that have formed within the time talked of in this article, where new partners come in and the violence can be around the previous relationships and children from those relationships. Women do still stay, even to the detriment of their children.
Of course men are on the end of domestic violence as well. We hear about it a lot now. Perhaps it was more widespread than we thought years ago, but just didn't hear about it.
I do wonder how the statistics of the modern day family units as opposed to married, with domestic violence break down.
Whatever the result, it will be the children who will bear the brunt and many will go on to need social service involvement as well.

Maybe it was the mention of the early 1990s, or the Labor triumvirate behind the pamphlet discussed here that raised this thought, but has Mr Hitchens ever given his opinion of John Smith, Labor's leader until his untimely death in 1994?

Does he think that had Mr Smith lived, and Tony Blair not gained the leadership (at least for a few years), that history may have been considerably different?

Liberal Fascism is just as ideologically opposed to the family as National Socialism and Bolshevism were.However total abolition a la Huxley's Brave New world is as yet impractical.The preferred method is for the state to in effect become head of the family paying the bills in many cases and supervising the children's upbringing in state monitored crèches.Children can also be used to control their parents by spying on them and lecturing them with the states ideas on climate change,green issues etc .And of course in time honoured fashion dissidents can be controlled through threatening to remove their children as the UKIP couple found.Children are the ultimate hostages to ensure compliant behaviour. The Alphas of the elite make sure they have far more personal control of their own children's upbringing with home help and private schools .A society composed of atomised individuals who have little loyalty to one another is what is being engineered.It is all about social control really.

Peter,
In 2004 I had to take the mother of my son, then 9 years of age to family court, at the request of social sevices,for custody.
This action added more stress to the already fractious relationship between parents and was a major contributer to my heart attack at 38 years.
My sons mother had been diagnosed some years before with bi-polar disorder and was on diagnosed medications yet got drunk almost every day.Medication of this sort do not mix with alchohol and the result made her unstable, uncaring, abusive.
At the family court meetings between her doctor and social workers,I raised this issue suggesting something to the effect of 'do you as her doctor not have a duty of care in this respect when you know she is almost an alchoholic no to contribute to her unstable state of mind? There seemed to me a disconect here.
Family courts are naturally bias towards the mother, I have no problem with this as in 99% of cases it would be right.But nature often doesnt observe percentages.
In many cases I have seen total faliures by social services as we all have.
Surely some sort of parent probation system would save a lot of heartache for the innocents involved whereby problems would be only too evident on a home inspection.
Especially today as we live in this accepted drug culture we have adopted.
I am 45 now and after my sons mother had spent a brief time in jail for violence I judged it had done her the world of good and there was a marked change in character ,sufficient to let him go back living with her although I see him when I want, and I doo frequently. he lives with me at the weekend and holidays.His mother also has made good progress in her life.
But the whole system here leans towards the mother and it is not always the case.
Free house just get pregnant is an unfortunate carrer option for young girls today.parental probation .

Very interesting. I was married in early 70's and so the timeline of all this has been through my children's time and now my grandchildren's time. The oldest early 20's. I have said for a long time that there has been a deliberate attempt to destabilise the traditional family.
I saw in the 90's how all the emphasis was on giving benefit and flat to young women who were pregnant. The father was sidelined by only being able to stay 3 nights a week. All the money went to the young woman, the male was basically redundant. Not an asset, because the benefit system didn't allow him to be.
Interesting because when we married young, there was no H.Benefit. You rented what you could afford. We rented rooms at the top of a house, like other friends our age. We saved, there was no club, or binge drinking culture or the "stuff" the young spend on today. You worked, got engaged you settled down.
Or like my mum's generation, you often married lived in the front room of one of the parent's houses, then gradually found a place to rent . All very family orientated
Of course as this policy became entrenched the message was, you didn't have to wait, if you were pregnant you could get a nice place right away, often just young single girls who had no intention of having to worry about a partner and then evolving to not even worrying about getting pregnant again by a different partner and getting a bigger place. The male was just a means to an end. After all the likes of Harman the feminists were giving the message, " who needs a man" and "women can have it all".
Then the marriage allowance, the child tax allowance the Family Allowance, gave way to tax credits to top up wages of young women who couldn't earn enough to support the family. Jobs that married women did to supplement wages of the main breadwinner when children went to school. The family allowance I got only for the second child to start then to first, then to child benefit..all easing away from the family unit and to single or cohabiting.

It's comforting to think that the breakdown of the nuclear family is all down to a handful of left wing feminists conspiring together back in 1990.

But Patricia Hewitt et al didn't spring fully formed from Zeus's head. They were as much a product of their upbrinng and experience as anyone else of the same generation.

Which, although I'm a few years younger, must include me. And I'd suggest that the main reason for the breakdown of the nuclear family is that it was bl****y miserable. And we were damned if we were going to grow up making the same mistakes as our parents.

So we made a whole bunch of brand new mistakes instead.

In this regard, we're no better or worse than any other generation of history. Progress was never a steady climb; more a series of stumbles and traverses, retreats and advances. Sure there's loads wrong with modern society, but you ask a woman in her mid twenties now if she'd like to return to the kind of life her grandmother might have led and you're unlikely to get a polite reply.

The fact is my mother HATED being a housewife. She was an intelligent woman and she felt trapped and thoroughly miserable. Cue the booze, the vallium, the rows, the depressions, the ECT, the suicide.

It would probably annoy the authors of that report to know that they had not really influenced the course of events as much as they would perhaps like. The truth is that the likes of Ms Harman are not really the authors of change... they merely comment on it and approve of changes in certain directions.

The underlying causes of those developments about which Mr H is rightly so concerned are much older and deeper than this silly pamphlet, authored by a bunch of silly women. Of all the causal factors, we should perhaps consider education and technological advances to be the most devastating.

Education is okay... if it is complete. The tragedy is that our education system enabled people to ridicule all those systems and beliefs which had once provided stable foundations for our society... but apparently had no interest in encouraging some serious self-critical assessment of what this might mean for individuals, families and communities. The result is that we have lots of people who still think and behave as though they are "special" (presumably in the eyes of some God or other)... but, for these people, there is no need to fear the wrath of a debunked God.

Technology is wonderful... if properly understood and cautiously used. Sadly, everyone happily avails themselves of technologies which they do not necessarily need... which they do not understand and which they use with an abandon which threatens their... and everyone else's... continued existence. Contemplate how many people really understand how an electric motor, vacuum cleaner, internal combustion engine... or personal computer... actually work. Needless to say that the "labor-saving" and "time-saving" features of such technologies leave people with enough time and energy to feel sorry for themselves and to attack those nearest and dearest to them.

The ultimate judgement on all that some are inclined to call "progress" is to be found in the number of people trying to destroy themselves with alcohol, excessive food consumption and narcotics (legal or otherwise).

Tony Dodd asks "But what do such people seek to gain by undermining the traditional family?" They seek to gain more control over the everyday lives of ordinary people. The biggest stumbling block for them is the traditional family. There is strength within and between families. Families look after themselves and one another. Traditional families provide continuity that resists change and they are by nature conservative. Socialists like to interfere and boss people around. They like to take away responsibility from families by high taxation and correspondingly high state spending. They really do believe that they know what is best for us and how to spend our money. They believe the state is best at child rearing. Better than two parents or in truth even one parent for that matter. But it is the traditional two parent family that is the biggest threat which is the only reason why they champion other arrangements - any other arrangements or combinations provided it's not a father and mother.. They don't like to see people managing their own lives because this is a threat to their positions. These are positions that they did not obtain by merit but through political association with people like themselves that are similarly unfit to govern. In a world where traditional families are the norm (much as we used to have) these left wing politicians would never hold the high office they do now. They know this. They knew it when they set out on their revolution decades ago and now probably can hardly believe how easy it all was. They actually get annoyed by traditional families. They much prefer a fragmented society. It's easier to control and to safeguard their own positions.

You could have forced people back into a family situation to your taste, but it would have taken violence and oppression, you could have forced educated women to not work, to simply produce more and more children and give up all hope of a fulfilling life outside the home, but people where rejecting and continue to reject that on mass, you would have required massive and violent state oppression and the enforcement of the forms of a vile and genocidal book (which btw the most common monogamous relationship mentioned is between a rapist and his victim, sold to him by her family) .

You still haven't given a definition of liberty that justifies your attitudes to women, the use of drugs etc...in short one that allows you to take away peoples control of their own bodies.

But what do such people seek to gain by undermining the traditional family? The breakdown of society? More state control? To what end?

Posted by: Tony Dodd | 11 April 2014 at 11:20 AM

In a word, compliance and the means to that end is dependency. The traditional nuclear family typical of my childhood was self-financing and that self sufficiency made possible freedom of thought. The inherent poverty of the single family model creates a dependency on the state. Dependence destroys freedom and makes everyone a believer in The Provider. When the number of people who depend on the state for their very survival reaches a critical mass, you have created an irreversible electoral majority for socialism in perpetuity.
This is why the two main parties are now so difficult to tell apart. The Tories felt it necessary to become Nuevo Labour on social policy while the Labour Party tried to be the party of big finance in a desperate attempt to pay for it all. It was a sort of political do-si-do. Take your partners!

"What would be more interesting, now that cohabitation and non-marriage have become much more common, would be to survey this problem in comparable households among the married and the unmarried."

I am currently reading 'The Vision of the Anointed' by Thomas Sowell. He states on page 172 that "a woman who heads her own household is nearly three times as likely to be beaten as a wife is. Separated,divorced and never-married women are all more likely to be beaten than a wife is. In other words, the traditional family is the safest setting for a woman - thought that is, of course not the message which the anointed seek to convey."

Whoa! Good find there. It certainly explains the origin of the bitter injustices perpetrated by 'Family Courts' which have led to the growth of groups such as Fathers for Justice.
When I think of all those young boys growing up without a firm, caring father to keep them in check, and all those young girls growing up without understanding that men can be reliable and steadfast towards women it makes me very concerned for the sort of decisions they will make when they grow to adulthood.

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